Infirmary / Churner — Untitled / Whisper

Dan E AKA Churner shares a C30 cassette with Illinois’ Infirmary for his label’s 84th release. For Infirmary it just precedes their debut LP (on Scratch and Sniff Entertainment) following over ten cassettes released over the past two years while for Churner it is merely one in a sea of almost a hundred releases in the same time frame. This sheer abundance of recorded output, mostly self-released, confronts the hardy listener with as much of a challenge as the individual sounds themselves – how to interact with something that’s constantly changing, yet always the same? And this release is as good as any at provoking thoughts orbiting this conundrum.

Infirmary’s untitled piece is ‘fifteen minutes of same’ with one small, surprising exception: about one minute into their extended blizzard of roving static all sounds stop to make way for a ten-second traditional piano refrain before the storm continues unabated for the rest of the piece as if it had never paused in the first place. Concentration on the constant billowing will reveal textural dimensions, like an emphasis on mid-range tones whose rolling boil creates its own natural rhythms, or at the end a possible intensification and new movements in the stereo field, but faced with such monolithic material these elements are as likely to be chance encounters as directed diversions.

Churner’s ‘Whisper’ is anything but. He spends the first couple of minutes on the drums rehearsing primitive rock beats over an enthusiastic scraping of what could be iron chalk on concrete board before suddenly flooding the recording with the massive rumbling of an eternal landslide. Modulated frequencies pit this unstoppable force of nature against a monster running uphill through the carnage as howling wind erodes the sound levels. Ultimately, there is no room for any more sound – new eruptions destroy previous ones as Churner spins us towards the volcano’s crater, before abrasively juddering to a sudden stop.

The meditative qualities endowed by severely minimal music are present here, but, interestingly enough, the listener may need to work harder than the artist to reach them. The abundance of releases is testament to a recording process that’s often live and uninhibited by the decisions that define most other styles, be they structural or technical. In this way it also has similarities to recordings of pure, improvised jazz, something that’s a document ‘of the moment’ ‘for those in the know’, yet poses a puzzle in terms of how much to take on and how closely to examine given the vast amount of one-take spontaneity available. So while this cassette works well in contrast to other listening habits, temporarily cleansing the mind of form and language, any magic it has only lasts for one play – repeated listens highlight uniformity rather than reveal new depths.